Organizations are transforming from static secrets (API keys, passwords, tokens) to managed identities that provide automatic, short-lived credentials without manual management.

While managed identities can eliminate 70-80% of secret management overhead for modern cloud-native workloads, a hybrid approach is needed since legacy systems and third-party APIs still require traditional secret management.

The book provides practical frameworks for migrating from static secrets to platform-native managed identities across AWS, Azure, GCP, and CI/CD systems while maintaining security and operational efficiency.